Monthly Archives: September 2013

Through Erin’s latest outfit post–how cute is that ’90s-esque flower dress?–I found out about the Fall Fashion Faceoff that Kelly of Masque Mag has organized. I have a few outfits in mind for the challenge, and I’ll be posting them soon! (Hint: there will be some plaid/leopard mixing, and some good times with multiple black-and-white-florals.)

In the meantime, here are some Polyvore collages I created inspired by the aesthetic(s) of the challenge. You can click the images for more information.

People from any marginalized group can do all the personal work on themselves they want, but that work is not going to magically get them off the margins and connected into the larger society. If you’re on the margins, it’s not your attitude that’s got you disconnected. It’s stigma and systemic exclusion. I can be the most psychologically healthy, spiritually evolved, kick-ass disabled person on the planet, and that is not going to solve the social, sensory, and architectural barriers that enforce my disconnection from the able-bodied world every single day.

Sarah Kendzior’s latest piece on poverty and workers’ rights is, as always, full of truth. The whole thing is a must-read–seriously, I’ll wait, go read it and then come back–but one part in particular resonated with me:

Teaching, nursing, social work, childcare and other “pink collar” professions do not pay poorly because, as Slate’s Hanna Rosin argues, women “flock to less prestigious jobs”, but because jobs are considered less prestigious when they are worked by women. The jobs are not worth less – but the people who work them are supposed to be.

I’ve been ranting about this for so many years.

So many of the men in my life have high-paying computer programming jobs, and so many of the women in my life have low-paying teaching and childcare jobs. I’ve worked in childcare myself, and let me tell you, it’s hard.

Having conversations at the toddler level all day is a special kind of mind-numbing. Spending all day in a room full of crying infants is a special kind of nerve-jangling. And sometimes you get peed on. (I learned the hard way to keep everything covered when changing baby boys’ diapers.)

There are the good moments too: when four toddlers are trying to fit in your lap for story time, when you’re out on a walk with the kids and one of them makes an observation and you see so much intelligence, so much creativity, so much promise just beginning to blossom. There are fun times with bubbles and balls and finger paint. There’s a playfulness you don’t get in the average office job.

But overall, it’s incredibly hard work–and vital to a well-functioning society, and laughably underpaid. Or it would be laughable, if it weren’t so serious an indictment of our nation’s priorities.

Not in the traditional anti-abortion sense (ugh), but in the sense of putting human lives first, and profit second. And since our lives are inextricably tied to the health of our planet, we need to prioritize that too.

We need an end to the ideology of infinite growth–which, in a world of finite resources, is quite literally unsustainable–and a focus on human health and happiness.

We need an end to the casual cruelty of corporate capitalism–the callous profit-seeking that allowed an adjunct professor to die penniless, near-homeless, and uninsured while the university’s president received a $700,000 salary.

Alongside the exhilaration of the flattening earth celebrated by Thomas Friedman, the planet (and our country) in fact contains increasing numbers of flattened people, flattened by the very forces that are making a few others wildly rich.

His observation is even more true now than when he first made it, back in the less-shitty days before the Great Financial Crisis.